To bolster my own faltering faith in our species, I turn from time to time to my giants. Isaac Asimov, Dick Feynman, Martin Gardner, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, a list that comforts me and yet makes me feel so minor and so impotent. These masters spoke for me, and far more eloquently, than I ever could have done for myself. While I exult at any accident of original phrasing that I may stumble upon, these titans strewed their work with memorable and exhilarating words, as if with no effort. What I offer you here this week is a good example of what I mean.
Here's a sobering image from JPL/NASA.
In his book, "Pale Blue Dot" (1994) Carl Sagan showed just where he obtained that provocative title. It's a photo that was taken by the space probe Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our neighborhood for the outer fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look back at its home planet. The camera was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away from Earth when it captured and sent back this lonely portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Carl wrote beautifully of the significance of that tiny image:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there � on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
I would add this to Carl's comments:
While acknowledging how very small this image makes us, I think that perhaps he saw the photo from a somewhat different view than that available to me and to most of us. Carl was immersed in exciting, innovative, ever-improving technology, all of which he was able to accept and incorporate into his philosophy and his everyday thinking processes. His poetic, sensitive, style of writing and thinking was hardly interfered with by the technology to which he was so attuned, but it may have distracted him from the one � to me � exhilarating and overpowering fact illustrated in this photograph: I rejoice that a fragile, quite imperfect, carbon-based, short-lived and very new species of Earth life was able to conceive, construct, and send a camera out into space, then command it to turn about and record an image of the place from which it originated.
Damn, but that's impressive! We've done alright, for being so insignificant on the cosmic scale. And we've got puppy-dogs and jazz music, too.....
To see such inspiring words as I've quoted above, read Sagan. And look in on www.planetary.org for more of the same....
I have a new comments section below since I finally went super-duper gold. Tell me something I don't already know already.